So, I see that Apple have released the latest iter­a­tion of their “amaz­ing” iphone. Each time a new iproduct gets released I find myself yelling at TV, Radio ads, and oth­er ignor­ant people who don’t seem to real­ise that their is noth­ing spe­cial about Apple products. This time I’m going to share a few thoughts pub­licly instead. I’ve just watched the offi­cial release video over on the Apple web­site. So, with that as the basis, here are my thoughts on the “new” fea­tures in the iphone 4S…

8 Mega­pixel cam­erafirst launches by nokia in Feb-2009. Now avail­able in over 120 phones.

1080p30 videoAvail­able on plenty of oth­er phones. First one that comes to mind is the HTC Sen­sa­tion. I can even do it with cus­tom ROMs on my 2 year old HTC Desire.

Image Sta­bil­isa­tionCome on? This is new?! There are no phones with REAL image sta­bil­isa­tion — its all elec­tric­al sta­bil­isa­tion, not optic­al.

Face Detec­tionIn photo’s? Android is about to bring face detec­tion to the lock screen! My 2 year old Desire does face recog­ni­tion. I’m pretty sure even older iphones do this per­fectly well.

icloudEver heard of google? They do all these things. Its a big part of their key busi­ness — tak­ing over the Inter­net. They’re already estab­lished, tried and tested. They’re access­ible on all plat­forms on all devices.

Dual-core chipalready in Sam­sung Galaxy S2, LG Optimus 2X, HTC Sen­sa­tion, Motorola Atrix, and no doubt plenty oth­ers very soon too. Also, I’d like to take issue with the claim that this speeds up web-brows­ing. The lim­it on web-brows­ing speed on a phone is nearly always caused by con­nec­tion speed. Unless you’re on 4G, which the iphone 4S doesn’t have! D’oh

What I notice is still miss­ing…

4G

con­tact­less pay­ment

adobe flash

replace­able bat­tery

free turn-by-turn nav­ig­a­tion

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3 Comments

You have to admit, the hard­ware is not rub­bish. iOS 5 and iCloud put right a lot of what was miss­ing, espe­cially when you com­pare it to Android. The new hard­ware and soft­ware fea­tures have clearly been designed in response to Android alone (Apple’s decision to badge up Siri as Beta is an indic­a­tion of their play­ing catch-up).

I dis­agree with you when you say that there’s noth­ing spe­cial about Apple products — I would say that there is. As your art­icle points out, they’re often not first with fea­tures. When they do decide to include them though, they’re usu­ally very well executed.

The hard­ware is fine. The soft­ware is ok too. Yes — it’s a clear response to android, and its a pretty good effort at a response too. How­ever, that’s the point — its a catch up — not innov­at­ive. And it hasn’t fully caught up — there are still things miss­ing. Why pay more for less?

You reck­on when they include them they’re “very well executed”. I don’t agree. It usu­ally takes them 3 gen­er­a­tions to get it right, if they ever do. The first ipods had ter­rible audio qual­ity, far inferi­or to the dia­mond Rio which came before it, and in some tests I read at the time, inferi­or to an ori­gin­al Sony walk­man from the 1980’s! There is also the issue of poorly designed anten­nas need­ing a rub­ber con­dom before the call qual­ity was what it should be. And of course the fact that Apple laptops lead the way in terms of num­ber of burn­ing bat­ter­ies. Giv­en that they pretty much only make PCs, mp3 play­ers, phones and tab­lets, and i’ve poin­ted out prob­lems with core func­tion­al­ity or safety in 3 of those 4, I can’t see how any­one can think they execute well first time.

On the oth­er hand, their mar­ket­ing is always executed excep­tion­ally well…

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